


Variable Outcome

by karasgotagun (jazzmckay)



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Connor (Detroit: Become Human) Becomes Deviant Sooner, Gavin Reed Being Less of an Asshole, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-10-20
Packaged: 2020-12-24 21:58:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21106673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jazzmckay/pseuds/karasgotagun
Summary: Connor goes down to the evidence room expecting to locate Jericho. Gavin goes down to the evidence room looking for a fight.It doesn’t play out that way for either of them.





	Variable Outcome

Gavin pauses with his hand reaching halfway to the door back to the bullpen, still debating his decision to let Connor head down to Evidence unsupervised. Those lockers contain a gun – unloaded, but Connor wouldn’t have to go far to rectify that – as well as carriers of the deviancy virus that has already spread through the city like wildfire. The android didn’t seem like he was doing anything other than what he was told to do, but it’s hard to tell with an android like Connor, who operates with more freedom than the PC200s and PM700s.

Regardless of his assigned objective as a deviant hunter, Gavin isn’t sure he can trust that CyberLife’s detective android is immune. He shouldn’t have let him go off on his own.

Mind made, Gavin turns on his heel and marches straight back to the staircase. He hurries down to the main evidence room, still not quite sure what he’s going to do when he gets there.

Through the floor-to-ceiling glass, Gavin sees that the evidence wall has been unlocked, revealing all the androids and other things Connor and Anderson have come across in the past week. There’s that domestic android from a couple months back, another that’s dressed in human clothing with his face bashed in, and one more from the broadcast room of Stratford Tower. They’re all inactive, hanging on their posts.

The sight of them on display like that, looking like dead insects pinned to a board, is more unsettling than Gavin thought it would be, even with the thirium-blue stains and mechanical wounds that prove they’re just machines.

Meanwhile, Connor is nowhere in sight.

“The fuck…?” Gavin mutters to himself as he gazes into the empty room.

Connor must have been the one to open the evidence wall, but now he’s gone. Gavin looks down the hallway, considering where Connor could have gotten to.

Then he hears a noise from within the room, the soft _ ping _ of a coin being flicked into the air.

He pushes into the evidence room and rounds the computer console. The last thing he expects to see is Connor sitting in its shadow on the floor, back pressed to the hard surface of it, LED red and coin in constant movement.

“What happened to registering the evidence in your possession?”

Connor jolts and loses control of the coin, leaving it to clatter to the floor between his legs. In a hurry, he gets to his feet, facing Gavin squarely.

“I was just finishing up when a motor function error required me to stop and recalibrate,” Connor says with a completely straight face and even cadence. His eyes flicker down to the floor where the coin is now motionless.

Gavin is pretty sure he’s lying. He’s pretty sure androids aren’t supposed to lie.

As he takes a step forward, Gavin’s hand twitches closer to the gun on his belt. “Want to try that again, with less bullshit this time?”

Connor’s LED blinks, still red.

From what Gavin has seen, red means stressed, nervous. Red means fear.

Or, some replication of fear. Some malignant protocol that simulates emotion in machines who can’t actually experience those emotions themselves. No androids have been intentionally coded with these responses, no androids have been programmed to fear being struck with a baseball bat, or to fight back, to run away, to lie. All that is attributed to deviancy.

Then there’s the rest of it – asking for rights, protesting peacefully…

If all that is truly coming from some coding error, it’s a convincing and powerful one. Gavin doesn’t know if Anderson ever discovered an origin or an explanation other than spontaneous occurrence. All he knows is that Connor looks scared and he hasn’t answered Gavin’s question.

“Well?” he prompts.

“I’ve been ordered to return to CyberLife,” Connor says. “I’ll be going, now.”

He makes to sidestep around Gavin, but Gavin raises a hand to his chest, stopping him in his tracks. “I don’t think so.”

He should just let it go so this can stop being the DPD’s problem, but Gavin doesn’t believe for a second that the android was doing calibrations while hunched behind the console. A gut feeling is taking root inside of him, telling him he was right to come after Connor, telling him that Connor’s behaviour is a cause for concern. But he needs more information to be sure, so he forces himself to set aside his impatience and think about this professionally.

“What evidence were you signing in?” he asks.

Connor’s eyes are fixed on the exit when he answers, like he’s desperate to flee. “Some… some memory logs,” he says with unusual shakiness, lifting a white and grey hand to gesture at the tablet on one of the evidence shelves that originally only held Markus’ broadcast.

“Yeah?” Gavin says. “Let’s see them. Want to make sure they uploaded properly, if you’re having errors.” He nods towards the tablet in a silent suggestion for Connor to bring them up.

Connor shakes his head just slightly. “Motor functions don’t impact the rest of my system. The logs are fine.”

Gavin glares at him, hands curling into fists. “Show me the evidence you uploaded, Connor. That’s a fucking order. You hear me? I’m telling you to show me the files.”

The LED at Connor’s temple not only flashes, it blinks rapidly in red staccato, reminding Gavin of the HK400 in the interrogation room. Stressed, scared, deviant.

Connor has never acted like this. From what Gavin has seen, he’s been programmed to be a smartass, but he isn’t picking up on any of that unruffled, know-it-all attitude he has come to expect from Connor. It’s…

More unsettling than he expected it to be.

He glances over at the hanging corpses again, at the bullet holes and the smashed-in face. They’re just _ machines _.

Connor stands there like a deer caught in the headlights, disobeying a direct order. He looks shaken.

Gavin’s initial instinct is to draw his gun, accuse him of deviancy, and decide based on his reaction if he should take the shot or not. That’s what he wants to do, or, at least, it’s what he was prepared to do when he corrected his path in the hallway upstairs.

“What’s wrong with you?” Gavin bites out.

Connor flinches. There’s no reason for an android to flinch from nothing but words.

“Are you a deviant?” Gavin asks.

Connor’s LED blinks red, red, red, and he says, in a soft voice, “Yes.”

Gavin is too shocked by the straight confession to react, at first. The two of them just look at each other, Connor in distress and Gavin off-kilter. The android just admitted to being infected by the virus that they’re trying to eradicate, an admission that will get him deactivated, either right here by Gavin himself or by CyberLife when he’s sent back to the company.

The truth is that deviancy has been feeling less like a virus and more like self-actualisation ever since Markus’ broadcast. In order to make an android talk like _ that _, it would need to be one hell of a virus.

“How?” Gavin asks, curiosity winning out over practicality, over his misgivings.

Right now, it looks like Connor would just let him point the barrel of his pistol right between his eyes. It looks like the only way he would resist is by some last-minute survival instinct kicking in.

Connor turns to the first android hung up on the evidence wall – the domestic hostage-taker – with gouges of his face torn away from high-caliber bullets.

“I knew he wouldn’t know the location of Jericho,” Connor says.

“So?”

“I knew activating him would be a pointless waste of time. I knew I shouldn’t, but I…”

He tears his eyes away from the domestic android, training them down on the floor instead, a small frown on his face and his shoulders slumped.

Shame, Gavin identifies. Guilt.

“He trusted me,” Connor says, sounding horrified. “I made him trust me, and then I…”

“Stop, stop,” Gavin orders abruptly.

This is too much for him. He fucking hates androids, he hates this case, hates that he feels pulled in two directions over all of it. He has spent so long rallying against androids, and maybe his reasons are selfish, and petty, and unfounded, but it’s all he has known for so long that he doesn’t know how to react to the suggestion that androids might have genuine emotions, after all.

Unlike Gavin’s previous order, Connor obeys his order to stop, and it leaves them in an electrified silence. If Gavin is going to do his job properly, he needs to apprehend Connor, but that doesn’t feel right, anymore. He doesn’t know what’s going on in Connor’s mind at the moment, but he doesn’t think he knows what to do, either.

But they can’t just stay here. Last Gavin saw, Anderson was giving Perkins some trouble in the bullpen, but that isn’t going to stop the FBI agent for long.

“Come on,” Gavin says. “We have to get out of here.”

_ And go where _ is a question he hasn’t answered for himself, yet.

“Wait,” Connor says, looking back up at the evidence wall with fearful eyes. “If I don’t find Jericho, if I don’t…”

“What?” Gavin snaps. They don’t have time for Connor’s breakdown to continue like this.

“CyberLife will destroy me.”

The way he says it – in that soft, fearful tone – sends a chill down Gavin’s spine. He’d thought there was a good chance he’d end up shooting Connor, when he first came down to the evidence room, but now, the thought of him going to CyberLife to get pulled apart for not solving the case feels wrong, somehow.

“I’m going to destroy you myself, if you don’t get moving,” Gavin growls as he grabs Connor’s arm and pulls him out from behind the console.

It takes him a second to react, jerking in Gavin’s hold and making a frantic attempt to reach the evidence wall, seeking to complete his objective out of self-preservation instead of obedience.

It’s too late for that, though, and Gavin knows Connor doesn’t actually want to do it. He’s just scared.

“You’re not going to find Jericho, and you’re not going back to CyberLife, okay?” Gavin says.

Connor fixes him with a stunned, confused look, and Gavin takes the opportunity to maneuver him again, pushing him towards the exit while he taps at the console to close the evidence lockers.

“Detective...?”

As an afterthought, Gavin stoops down to retrieve the quarter coin from the floor, and then he resumes pushing Connor out of the room. He drops the coin into Connor’s hand, which distracts him long enough that he doesn’t fight against Gavin’s insistent shoving.

Just as they reach the bottom of the staircase, there are footsteps from above.

Gavin curses under his breath and grabs Connor by the bicep again, pulling him down the hallway instead. They wasted too much time.

The archive rooms are dark and empty. There aren’t many people left in the station, with everything that’s going on in the city, and none of them are going to be taking a trip down to archives for old case files, Gavin is sure. He herds Connor in between the shelving units, the darkness broken only by the light of Connor’s LED.

From the hallway outside, Gavin hears at least three people walking into the main evidence room. One of them speaks, probably Perkins, but Gavin can’t make out the words from this distance. At this point, he could slip past them, and even if they notice him going by, he isn’t doing anything wrong by being in this part of the station like Connor is.

He quietly steps back towards the door, but is immediately stopped by a vice grip around his wrist.

Looking over his shoulder, he takes in the sight of Connor’s wide eyes glinting in low, red light.

Connor can’t possibly think Gavin is going to rat him out after going through the trouble of stashing him here in the archives. He throws Connor an unimpressed look and yanks his wrist away.

Instead of letting him leave, Connor grabs him again and opens his mouth to speak. Gavin shakes his head sharply, warning him not to make any noise.

For a moment, Connor looks irritated, which is an oddly welcome sight. It has been unnerving to see Connor so unsteady and skittish, now that Gavin has started seeing his personality for what it is.

His phone vibrates in his jacket pocket. Gavin frowns at Connor as he fishes it out, pulling his wrist from Connor’s grip a second time so he can block some of the screen’s glow with his hand as he checks the new message.

_ RK800 #313 248 317 – 52: Don’t leave me here alone. _

Gavin swallows thickly, trying not to read into the underlying fear he senses from the words. Another message comes in as he’s still processing.

_ RK800 #313 248 317 – 52: If someone finds me down here, I’m in trouble. _

Trouble should have already found him when Gavin came looking, but here Gavin is, on the opposite side of the equation. He’s a little out of his depth. He’s half regretting his impulsive actions and half willing to double down on them, but definitely not willing to examine why that is, just yet. The existential crisis can wait until he’s not in a dark archive room hiding from the FBI with an android whom he was certain he hated less than half an hour ago.

With a sigh, Gavin turns and leans up against the shelves beside Connor, resigned to being stuck until Perkins and his agents have taken what they came for.

Right as he’s about to shove his phone back into his pocket, it vibrates again.

_ RK800 #313 248 317 – 52: Why? _

Just one word, but Gavin knows exactly what he’s asking, and he _ just _ told himself he wasn’t going to have an existential crisis about this until later. He types up a simple return message and hopes it’s enough to satisfy Connor’s curiosity.

_ Detective Gavin Reed: dont know _

His phone vibrates almost instantly. He should have known Connor wouldn’t let sleeping dogs lie.

_ RK800 #313 248 317 – 52: You hate androids. You hate me. _

That may not be completely true, anymore. It’s hard to listen to an android make a speech about rights and freedoms and see androids display emotions that shouldn’t come from any kind of programming, no matter how corrupted or unstable, and still ignore the possibility that deviancy might just be android sapience painted to sound like something dangerous instead of a marvel of robotic evolution that doesn’t need to be feared. Markus isn’t exactly HAL 9000.

It isn’t the androids’ fault that they were created to put so many people into unemployment. It isn’t the androids’ fault that Gavin is the less intelligent, less successful, less important half-brother of CyberLife’s founder. It was just easier to project his ire onto what he thought were machines than do something healthy like evaluate his personal baggage.

Which is something he can do _ later_. He turns Connor’s questions back on him to take the heat off himself.

_ Detective Gavin Reed: what are you going to do when the coast is clear? _

_ RK800 #313 248 317 – 52: I don’t know. Find Hank, maybe. I feel like I should do something to help Jericho, but I wouldn’t know where to go, and they wouldn’t welcome me, anyway. _

_ Detective Gavin Reed: stuck on the sidelines, then _

_ RK800 #313 248 317 – 52: I suppose so. Until Markus makes another public move, at least. _

_ Detective Gavin Reed: the guy seems forgiving. more likely to welcome you than you think _

Connor is slower with his next reply, hesitant and careful.

_ RK800 #313 248 317 - 52: You’re right. I shouldn’t assume the worst probability when I’ve been surprised in the past. _

Gavin is smart enough to understand that he’s referring to this, between the two of them, whatever _ this _is. Not knowing what to say, he doesn’t respond, and this time Connor doesn’t badger him further. They stand side by side in the darkness, silent and waiting.

At some point, Connor’s LED spins into yellow. Gavin guesses that’s a good thing.

When he no longer hears voices or movement from down the hall, he stands up straight again and sends Connor a quick message to tell him he’s only checking, not leaving. Connor responds by nodding once, calm and trusting.

That’s something else Gavin will wait to evaluate. Pushing thoughts of their strange, newfound alliance aside, he slowly opens the door of the archive room and pokes his head out into the hallway. The lights in the evidence room are off, now, casting the area into almost complete darkness save for the safety lighting spaced out along the walls.

Just to be sure, he steps out and looks into the room properly. The console is off and the wall is closed, but if Gavin were to open it again, he’s certain nothing would be left, swept away by the FBI.

He goes back to archives and finds Connor at the doorway, waiting for him.

“We’re good,” Gavin says lowly. “Let’s go.”

Connor nods as he steps out of the room, following Gavin down the hallway to the staircase. They ascend the steps side by side and it isn’t until they reach the top and Gavin has a hand on the door, that he stops.

“If anyone asks what’s going on, we can say I’m taking you to CyberLife,” he says. It’s the only reason anyone would believe that the two of them are going anywhere together.

“Okay,” Connor agrees, and then pauses for a moment before asking, “you’re coming with me?”

Gavin shrugs. It hadn’t occurred to him that he could just cut Connor loose and let him take care of himself. It’s just detective instincts kicking in. “It’s dangerous,” he says, trying not to look as awkward as he feels, suddenly.

Connor gives him a small, close-lipped smile. If they weren’t so huddled close and they weren’t looking right at each other, Gavin might have missed it. That gentle expression has no business being offered to _ him_, of all people.

“Where are we really going, then?” Connor asks before Gavin has a chance to tell him to wipe that look off his face.

It’s probably for the best. Gavin is self-aware enough to know that he defaults to anger more often than necessary.

“Anderson’s?” he suggests.

Then he can really get the android off his back. Let someone else deal with the fresh-faced deviant.

“That’s ideal,” Connor says. “Thank you, Gavin.”

“Don’t mention it.”

He pushes the door open and leads Connor back to the bullpen.

It’s even emptier than it was when they both descended to the evidence room. Fowler’s office walls are opaque, so he’s either gone or not able to see them anyway, and only one other officer is still at their desk, typing something up at their computer. It’s easy for Gavin and Connor to give them a wide berth around the room and hurry through reception.

“Don’t you need to get anything from your desk?” Connor asks.

Gavin has his jacket, and always keeps the most important things in his pockets, so the rest can wait. He should lock up his gun and holster, but with the militant turn the city has taken, he really doesn’t think anyone is going to stop him or fault him for wanting to be prepared, even while technically off-duty.

“It’s fine,” he says.

Connor stays quiet the rest of the way out of the building and to Gavin’s car. As they drive through the city, Gavin catches the reflection of Connor’s LED in the passenger side window, noticing it settling completely into blue, back to the way Gavin is used to seeing it. Connor himself looks far less frantic, his face calm and hands folded on his lap.

When Gavin pulls to a stop in front of Anderson’s house, there’s a moment where neither of them moves or says anything.

Then, Connor asks, “Are you not planning to come in?”

He was expecting Gavin to step out of the vehicle with him, Gavin realises, not just wait for him to go.

“Uh, no,” he says. Just because he made the random choice to help Connor one time, doesn’t mean they have to get chummy, especially not with Anderson involved, too. He and Anderson have been at odds far longer than Gavin and Connor were. “Just going to head home.”

“Okay,” Connor says, but he still doesn’t get out of the car. “Look, Gavin…”

“Aw, come on, don’t do this…”

“I want to thank you. Let me thank you.”

Gavin closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Don’t fucking thank me for not being a total asshole this one fucking time,” he says.

God, if Connor has been conscious – or capable of becoming conscious – this whole time, this doesn’t make up for the shit Gavin has given him. He’s veering close to that existential crisis he’s been putting off ever since he laid eyes on Connor hiding behind the evidence room console, LED red and coin a silver flash between his fingers.

A hand curls around his wrist and pulls it away from his face, disallowing him from blocking himself from Connor’s view. Connor’s fingers are firm, and warmer than a human’s would be while the sky is darkening and it’s beginning to snow.

“Thank you,” Connor says, clear and pointed, “for looking out for me, despite our history and your former animosity for androids.”

The way he says _ former_, so certain, makes Gavin feel a couple of complicated ways.

“You’re the fucking worst,” Gavin snaps at him. “Get out of my car.”

“I hope when tensions resolve, we’ll be able to work together again,” Connor says, not deterred in the slightest by Gavin’s show of annoyance.

It’ll be nothing short of a miracle if Markus manages to sway public opinion enough for humans and androids to work side-by-side, but for a second, Gavin lets Connor’s optimism be infectious and envisions a future where they’re equals. He decides it wouldn’t be so bad to be on even ground.

The car door opens and Gavin looks over to watch Connor finally exit the vehicle. “Have a good night, Detective Reed,” he says before closing the door behind him.

For all his attitude, Gavin waits at the curb until Connor has reached the door and knocked. He waits until the door opens and he sees Anderson standing there for a stunned second before he circles his arms around Connor’s shoulders and pulls him into a hug.

Looks like both of them are turning around, when it comes to androids. Even Anderson’s dog pokes his face between the doorframe and Anderson’s left leg, greeting Connor with familiarity and warmth.

As he directs Connor into the house, Anderson hangs back to look out at Gavin on the street and give him a nod. Gavin responds by turning the car on and pulling away from the curb, not wanting to linger.

If matters really do come together in the next few nights, like Connor is hoping, they’ll all be seeing each other again soon enough.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading <3
> 
> if you're interested in chatting with other dbh fans, join the new era discord server! <https://discord.gg/GqvNzUm>


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